Lost Boy: The Killing of James Bulger review - A sensitive, forceful call for justice

Almost three decades on, this documentary is a harrowing reminder of a murder that shook the world
Denise Fergus, mother of James Bulger
PR handout
Jochan Embley11 March 2021

Time has done nothing to soften the horror of James Bulger’s murder. Almost three decades on from the crime that shook both the public consciousness and the British legal system to their cores, it remains gut-wrenchingly awful to revisit. The physical details of the two-year-old’s death are still unbearably grim; listening to his mother Denise Fergus recount the moment she briefly lost sight of her son in a shopping centre is still heartbreaking; and it’s still bone-chilling to hear audio of police interviews with James’s 10-year-old killers recounting the atrocity in their timid, childish voices.

It’s difficult to imagine how Fergus can speak, as she does in this Channel 5 documentary, with such clear-eyed focus about something so painful. But it may well be that she feels there’s a need to take back control of her son’s story. In 2019, Fergus publicly denounced the film Detainment, which recreated the police interrogations of the young killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. It was nominated for an Oscar, but was made without Fergus’s consent. “You have no right to use what happened to my son as a way to try and make a name for yourself,” she wrote at the time in a letter to the film’s director Vincent Lambe.

And as she has made clear over the years, as well as in this documentary, Fergus feels like she has never received full justice for the death of her son on February 12, 1993. When Thompson and Venables were eventually found guilty, becoming the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history, they were sentenced to detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure, with a minimum tariff of seven years and eight months. “That wasn’t just a kick in the teeth, it was a stab in the back,” Fergus says here.

What the documentary also makes obvious is the disbelieving shock of the murder, and how deeply it resonated through every level of society. The film recounts the disappearance and subsequent police investigation in careful detail, interviewing a handful of the officers involved. As they look back on it all, they frequently comment on just how incredulous they were — and seemingly still are — that young boys could do such a thing. Both the officers and Fergus remember how they felt slightly reassured when CCTV footage showed it was two youngsters, not adults, who had led James away from the Strand shopping centre in Merseyside. “I felt relieved,” Fergus says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to get them back again. There’s no way they’re going to be able to hurt him, they’re too young’.” The irony is wincingly cruel.

Even Sir Richard Henriques QC, leading prosecuting counsel during the trial, admits that he felt “more emotionally involved than I have done in any other case”, adding that the sight of these two boys in the dock of an adult court “was a shock in itself”. Time is also dedicated to unpacking the public reaction — ranging from love and support to fear and outright rage — as well as the media frenzy that engulfed the case. Everyone, we’re shown, was reeling.

Some of the most moving interviews are given by James’s brother Michael, and his two half-brothers Thomas and Leon, each in their 20s. We hear about how James is often spoken about in the family home, and how a chair is left empty for him during Christmas dinner. And despite them talking about how “close” the family is now, they also explain how the residual trauma of the murder has seeped through. Michael remembers never being allowed on school trips, or to the shops with friends, and wonders how his family history will affect his relationship with his own son in the future.

With all the noise and anguish that surrounds the murder, it’s perhaps understandable that so much focus is on the what and the how, instead of the why. Why exactly did Venables and Thomspon commit such unspeakable crimes? The word “evil” is often used by some of the documentary’s interviewees, and though we do briefly hear about the neglectful upbringing of both children, the issue is never fully explored. Both Venables and Thompson were released on lifelong licence in 2001 and given new identities; Thompson hasn’t been recalled to prison since, but Venables is currently locked up for possessing indecent images of children.

Those questions about what led the two boys to commit murder, as well as whether the legal system is fit to deal with such a thing, are still to be answered. Instead, the documentary stands as a sensitive but forceful reminder of the need for justice that’s still within Fergus. As she says: “I’m never going to let this go.”

Parts one and two of Lost Boy: The Killing of James Bulger is available to watch on catch-up with My5

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